Position: Professor; Centre for Ibero-American Studies; Chair of the Board of the PhD programme Latin American Studies
Department: Ibero-American Studies
E-mail: josef.opatrny@ff.cuni.cz
Phone: +420221619514
Postal address: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Centre for Ibero-American Studies, Hybernská 3, Praha 1, Nové Město, 110 00, Czech Republic
Publications: Full bibliography
Josef Opatrný studied history and Czech language and literature at Charles University and has been teaching courses on Spanish and Latin American history at the Department of Romance Studies and the Department of Translation Studies since the 1970s. His main interests include: history of Cuba during the ninetieth and twentieth century, the formation of modern nations in Latin America, the image of America in Czech society, and relations between Central Europe and America. In the 1980s, he published a monograph Antecedentes históricos de la formación de la nación cubana (1986) and a text about the relations between Cuba and theUnited States US Expansionism and Cuban Annexationism in the 1850s (1990).
During the first decade of the 21th century, he organized four international congresses about immigration from Central Europe to Latin America and edited collective monographs based on the contributions: Emigración centroeuropea a América Latina (2000), Emigración centroeuropea a América Latina, II (2003), Emigración centroeuropea a América Latina, III (2005), and Emigración centroeuropea a América Latina. IV. Emigración en testimonio y novelas (2006). In cooperation with a group of his doctoral students, he published the first book about relations between Czechoslovakia and Latin America during the Cold War, Las relaciones entre Checoslovaquia y América Latina 1945-1989 en los archivos de la República checa (2015).
He has participated in conferences both in the Czech Republic and abroad (Spain, Mexico, UK, France, Austria etc.) with contributions dedicated to the problems of migrations and relations between Czechoslovakia and America. He organized two congresses on this topic in Prague and coordinated the collective monographs Las relaciones checo-mexicanas (2011) and Las relaciones checo-argentinas (2014). Since 2000, he has been organizing the Prague summer school for Instituto tecnológico y de estudios superiores de Monterrey (Mexico) on Central European history and culture in a globalized word.
Josef Opatrný will co-supervise one MOVES research project: “Myths of Migration and Their Significance in Past and Present”.
